25 useful commands in Linux/UNIX for Beginners

I’m not sure that #24 (dig) and #25 (host) are absolutely necessary, #18 (startx) is possibly outdated these days, and the compression tools (6-9) are much of a muchness, but apart from that, #1 – #23 should be familiar to anyone who claims to be experienced with UNIX/Linux. If somebody was missing one, it would have to be #18 (startx), as (a) it’s not needed on servers, and (b) modern *nix distros will boot into a GUI automatically when possible.

Heh, startx outdated… maybe, but I hate it when (rarely as there is never need for reinstalling) I install a new distro on an emty clean partition and then it wont even ask, but makes it boot right into X – daamn, I’ll start my X windows when I feel like it :)

Good articles, btw…

any idea if it’s possible to emulate array variables with plain bourne shell? I know arrays work fine on /bin/sh that links to bash and was stunned when I tested the same script on SunOS and realized that there is no support for arrays on sh :x

I would never put tar in the same class as the zip utilities. tar basically creates a simple text file, with human readable content, and does not necessarily compress. The zip utilities compress files and cannot be read without being unzipped.

I believe that zip can also create uncompressed files (zip -0), as tar can create compressed files (tar czf). Using gzip compression with a tar file generally creates a smaller tarball than zip with LZW compression.